Miscellaneous Stuff

[ LiB ]

Miscellaneous Stuff

There are a lot of little things that help make a person a better recording engineer or producer in the digital realm. And it's the little things that count in life, right? So, here I'll give you some tiny tips that may not seem all that big but might just save your butt at some point.

Backing Up

I am a fastidious backer-upper. I started using computers for my writing a long time ago. I actually did write with a typewriter at first, before word processors were common. I was born in 1964, and I've been writing almost every day since 1978. I used to take a copy of the latest version of my latest project once a week and bring the discs over to a friend's house. This was in case my house burned down or my computer died or was stolen.

Later, when I was writing my novel, I would upload the last copy every night to an unlinked spot on several servers (usually extra space on servers of people I had done Web design work for). A novel doesn't take up much space, and those people are unaware of what you have on their server, and they will never know. There are probably STILL copies of various drafts of my novel on unlinked spots on other people's Web sites. I don't remember. I would make sure to use servers in different cities, in case my city (San Francisco at the time) were destroyed by an earthquake. This is sort of the reason the Internet was invented: The United States Army made the Internet to have a computer system that would survive a nuclear war.

If you don't do Web design and don't know how to FTP files, you can do the same effect with e-mailing a copy to yourself on some Web-based mail service like Hotmail or Yahoo!. Then a copy of your file is stored on their server.

NOTE

Yahoo! gets a lot less spam than Hotmail.

I recall talking to some girl at a party about my fastidious backing up. She pretty much told me that I was an idiot, and an anal retentive idiot at that.

Two months later, her completed novel was lost when her laptop was stolen out of her car. She had no backup copy. Three months after that, this anal retentive's novel hit the shelves .

The thing that got me into making backups was this: When I went to community collegeJohn Adams campus at City College of San Franciscokids from the neighborhood would sneak into the building and mess with whole computer labs by flipping the breakers in the hall. I started hitting Ctrl + S every two minutes to save, in any program. I still do.

I back up important audio and video projects on an external FireWire drive, daily if I'm working a lot. I also back them up to re-recordable data DVDs (password-protected in case I lose them) and keep them somewhere else, in case my house gets burned down or robbed. Sometimes, I even make daily DVD backups and carry them with me. To me, my data is my life . While I am working on this book right now, I would rather lose everything in my apartment (including family heir-looms and about $10,000 worth of electronic and musical equipment and cameras and such) than lose all the data on the $80 hard drive on my computer.

That's why I back up constantly.

If there were a fire, I'd just grab my cat and my computer. Or even just the kitty and today's backup. Computers are so cheap that they barely matter. It's the work on them that I venerate. When traveling abroad, I bring my best work on a couple DVDs in my backpack . That way, if I decide not to return, I'm set. [3.]

[3.] I don't love Los Angeles and I'm maybe looking for a cool place to move. If you have any suggestions, in the U.S. or otherwise , please e-mail me at MD@kittyfeet.com and tell me where I should move and why. Bid for it. It's a contest. Whoever sells me on their town with the best of everything wins me in their town for a year or more.

My life exists as multiple copies of art that affect people. It lives out in the world, not in my town or my car or my bank account or any of that shit. My apartment need only function as a place to sleep, love, and make art. I could live anywhere and do what I do. I don't care about amassing stuff, unless it is for making music, video, art, whatever. Basically, I could take a laptop and leave anytime .

Figure 12.64. A copy of my novel, Starving in the Company of Beautiful Women , holding up a broken side of my bed [4.] (me and a gal broke it, somehow). See, books are not sacred: The object that contains the art is not sacred. Only the content is. And there's plenty more copies of this content out in the world.

graphic/12fig64.gif


[4.] This is kinda cute because one of the only bad reviews this book every got was a consumer review on Amazon.com where someone wrote something like, "I had to rate this one star to be able to post the review, but even that's generous. Couldn't there be a lower rating, like maybe an icon of a book holding up the short leg of a table?"

NOTE

You can use FireWire or even regular removable hard drives for going from studio to studio. You could record the drum tracks in the big room of an expensive studio and save money by taking the project home to finish in your home studio.

Telecommuting for Art

You can record over distances with other people. The song "Smelly Piano" on the CD was recorded as a snail mail collaboration with Mike Pickle. My friend Dave Majka programmed the drums and did the engineering. I played piano and bass and did the singing . We mixed it and mailed a CD to Mike Pickle, who added the lead guitar and mailed a new CD back to me.

Theoretically, with DSL, you might almost be able to do this in real time over the Internet, but I've not yet tried it.

You could certainly e-mail FL Studio projects. Since they are basically just the sheet music (like MIDI), they are tiny.

NOTE

Troubleshooting Tip: Just because the Device Manager on your PC says "This device is working properly" doesn't mean it is. It simply means that the hardware is still responding electrically. One day Tiffany couldn't use her computer to connect to the Internet. The Device Manager said that her modem was working correctly. I went over there and pulled the modem out and there was a big electrical burn mark near where the phone plugs in to it. We went to Good Guys, spent 19 bucks on a new modem, slipped it in, and she was instantly in business again.

[ LiB ]


[d]30 Music School
The Angel Experiment (Maximum Ride, Book 1)
ISBN: 1592001718
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 138

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